How is Elo determined in COH2? Does it interact with ranking at all in organizing the automatch? Reason I ask is if I have a faction where I'm ranked in the top 100, I usually get other very high rank people on my team, if I have a very low rank on a faction, it usually gets placed with other very low rank players, this seems to cause a complete imbalance, where you are likely to win matches with your high ranking faction with high Elo but get stuck into a black hole which basically only goes down and down with a low ranking faction if you have high Elo where you are paired with low Elo players in attempt to "even out" the combined Elo of the team. Seems tailor made to cause complete imbalance where one team has more evenly skilled players where the other team has maybe two good players and two bad players or one very good player and 3 bad players.
I don't care about rank, but the quality of game play with my high ranking factions makes them actually enjoyable, but the game play in low ranking factions feels like I'm smashing my teeth with a hammer. In the factions where I have high rank, the stats are almost always very even across all players in the match, games typically last 20-30 minutes 50/50 about win/los., In my low rank factions, I'll usually have 3-5x the damage, kills, caps, Kill/Death ratio of everyone else on my team, games are either over in about 5-10 minutes or drag on over an hour with about a 25/75 win/loss.
Its completely separate from ranking and its invisible, as I have said on the example, top 10th soviet player can have different elo then top 10th okw player.
You gain and lose elo based on opponents elo. For example, beating much weaker opponent will give you say +2 elo(which does -NOT- translate to rank directly, but is connected to it), but losing to much weaker opponent can result in loss of 20 elo for you and much higher gain for him.
The best explanation possible would be to play DoW2 multiplayer if it wasn't completely dead, because on top of rank you can see your own elo, gains and loses after every game.
However all the above aside, elo tries to make sure to average out and put you on the level of skill that is best suited for you.